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Tuesday, 31 March 2015

Huge Alien Planet Bathes in the Light of Four Suns

Astronomers have spotted a fourth
star in a planetary system called 30 Ari, bringing the number of known
planet-harboring quadruple-sun systems to two.

"Star systems come in myriad forms. There can be single stars, binary stars,
triple stars, even quintuple star systems," study lead author Lewis
Roberts, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "It's
amazing the way nature puts these things together."

30 Ari lies 136
light-years from the sun in the constellation Aries. Astronomers
discovered a giant planet in the system in 2009; the world is about 10
times more massive than Jupiter
and orbits its primary star every 335 days. There's also a pair of
stars that lie approximately 1,670 astronomical units away. (One AU is
the distance between Earth and the sun — about 93 million miles, or 150
million kilometers).

Karen Teramura / Karen Teramura

30 Ari with its newly discovered companion stars.

The newfound star circles
its companion once every 80 years, at a distance of just 22 AU, but it
does not appear to affect the exoplanet's orbit despite such proximity.
This is a surprising result that will require further observations to
understand, researchers said.

To a hypothetical
observer cruising through the giant planet's atmosphere, the sky would
appear to host one small sun and two bright stars visible in daylight.
With a large enough telescope, one of the bright stars could be resolved
into a binary pair.

The discovery marks just
the second time a planet has been identified in a four-star system. The
first four-star planet, PH1b or Kepler-64b, was spotted in 2012 by
citizen scientists using publicly available data from NASA's Kepler
mission.

Planets with multiple
suns have become less of a novelty in recent years, as astronomers have
found a number of real worlds that resemble Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's
home planet in the Star Wars films.